Antidote

Chapter 14.

I owe you all so many more chapters. I owe you all the book. I see myself apologizing to you often and once again I am sorry for not writing and updating. I wish I was better at this. But I do hope you all enjoy this little bit that I do publish.

______________________________________________________________

I stare at the board in front of me and the seven letters on my rack scanning over the words already made up. Hayden lays down his new word 'whizbang' connecting it to the letter 'N' that was already on the board and adds his total. "Seventy-six and it's on a triple word score, so I believe that's two hundred and twenty-eight points."

"Now I'm convinced you're cheating." I pout being a very sore almost-loser. The game is nowhere near over and I can already see I'm going to lose. I never lose Scrabble. "What the hell is a whiz-bang anyway?"

"It's a word." He laughs. "I've never known you to be a sore loser."

"Well the only time we've played a competitive game was Vegas and I won then so you didn't have to face it." That day was the start of so many things for us. That was the day I saw my future with this man, or at least it's what I desired.

"Jeez," He sighs thinking back to that time all those years ago. "So much has happened since then. Who would've thought this is where strip poker would lead us."

"Playing Scrabble together in LA with me losing by . . ." I look down at the score and laugh, ". . . three hundred points."

He joins me in my laughter, "I once read an entire dictionary for fun in just three days. If you wanted an actual chance of winning you should've chosen a different competitor or a different game."

"I always knew you did," I mentioned this to him once before. There's no reason why anyone would know so many big words. I'm able to converse with him and upkeep conversation because I use context clues to infer the things he's saying sometimes.

"But why?" I can't help myself from asking.

"My father locked me in my bedroom for two weeks straight the time after he broke my arm. I had nothing in there but books, so I read. It was over the Christmas holidays so I didn't have school. I wasn't allowed to be with the family or Wes at all. I was forced to eat alone in my bedroom on Christmas Eve and I didn't get any presents on Christmas morning. He told me my life alone was a gift because I wasn't even supposed to have that."

No wonder why he hates Christmas. My heart always breaks hearing about the things Hayden's father used to put him through and how even after all of that all he ever wanted was his love and approval. Even as an adult, it's all he cared about. "I'm so sorry Hayden."

"Alice." He glares at me. I already know what he's going to say. He doesn't want my apology or he doesn't need it. But I can't stop myself from not feeling sorry for him that he had to experience this from someone he loves so much. "It's in the past, you don't have to be sorry. You didn't do it and the one who did isn't sorry at all."

"I know but I still feel so bad for you. You've been through a lot."

"While that's true having you in my life has made up for a lot of that shit." Neither of us is focusing on Scrabble anymore. We've moved on from the games to something real, something true. "I want to make you promise me that you'll stay but I know I can't ask that of you."

"Because I made a promise before and I broke it." My hand takes his in my own automatically going to the black ring on his middle finger. The promise ring I gave him on the plane back from New York after I was angry with him for kissing Lina in front of me.

"Promises are paramount to me Alice you know that."

"Is that why you kept this on?"

He nods before he speaks, "Taking off the ring meant that you weren't coming back, it was the end of us, and I would for good lose the only woman I have ever loved. It meant that you broke your promise to stay. I wasn't ready to let go of you yet and I was selfish, that's why I kept it on."